Stepping into the arena against dozens of behemoths bent on ultra-neat photo management, Flickr has released a new beta featured dubbed – as Apple fans have had used once again since iOS 8.1 – Camera Roll.
Flickr’s Camera Roll is a browser-based desktop interface aimed at neatly presenting your uploaded photographs in a chronological timeline.
Camera Roll is organised into categories divided by the year taken, in which a user can select a specific month to review the images they uploaded at that time.
Images in the service are either represented by a small or medium image thumbnail of the variety iPhoto users are presently familiar with.
From Camera Roll, users are able to sort through the various images they’ve uploaded and can additionally select specific photographs to add to a new Flickr album. Batch editing is also a reality, though purely through meddling with metadata – privacy settings, copyright protection, as well as tagging can be implemented through the batch edit menu.
Entering a highly competitive field through the eventual release of Camera Roll, Flickr is set not only to take on Dropbox’s popular Carousel photo management service/app, but additionally Google’s Drive backup service (which uploads and auto-edits – if enabled – photos for display on Google +) as well as file backup services available through Box and Microsoft’s OneDrive, in addition to other smaller cloud services.
Apple is also expected to reinvent itself within the photo management sphere imminently, with the release of it’s Photos for Mac client which replaces iPhoto. Photos for Mac enables Apple users to upload (if enabled) every image in their library to their iCloud Photo Library for viewing on connected devices. Whether Flickr’s new solution can prove to be competitive remains to be seen.
To see if your account is eligible to begin using Camera Roll, head to your Flickr page, head on over to the You menu, and if there’s a Beta badge present, you’re set to begin using Flickr’s newest addition.
Follow Bryan on Twitter: @bryansmith1138
